Elbow soreness and iron crosses (need sanity check)

I recently achieved an iron cross, and I've been performing them regularly during my straight-arm strength sessions since then. I'm taking it slow and doing 2x4s holds per session, twice a week. I'm planning on maintaining this steady state for several weeks before attempting to add more volume. I've noticed that they tend to make my elbows pretty sore afterwards. I don't get any sharp pains, but my brachialis and biceps in particular get quite sore, and so does the part of the triceps near my elbow. Foam-rolling and massaging help to alleviate the soreness, but it does last for several days. 

My intuition is that I should be feeling some pretty intense soreness in these areas given the new load being placed on them, but I figured it was a good idea to double check. Is this soreness a sign that I should back off, or is it pretty much normal when first learning a cross to have a lot of soreness around the elbows? 

Key point is to not get injured. This intense soreness may also be a sign that number of your muscle fibers are torn (as this is a heavy load and probably intensity at this moment) - you don't mention tendon issues, so I take your tendons are prepared for cross. At the beginning my take would be to take longer breaks from time to time to give biceps good time to recover fully, how often would depend on couple of factors, but maybe a blind guess every 2-3 weeks or even more often and don't increase intensity until biceps gets strong enough. Prolonged period of heavy loading muscles without giving them time to fully recover is a good way to a bigger problem.

Btw. grats for achieving cross. Post some video.

I'm not familiar with iron cross training in particular, but I think you would do well to lower the volume until you get more accustomed to it.  Sounds like you're working muscles that haven't been put under this much stress before.

Kind of like when you start squatting and you get sore for days afterwards.  Congrats on the hold! I think you may be jumping into it a bit too fast though. Then again, I don't know anything substantial about training a cross, only about training in general.

I think you should lessen some of the volume like what the other guys said. Congrats on the cross and now that you have both maltese and iron cross, which one puts more stress on the elbows? I'm assuming the cross since you never mentioned having this problem when you got the maltese. I've always thought maltese was harder on the elbows.

Thanks for the congratulations guys. I'll try to post a video Friday when I do crosses again. 

B1214N said:

I think you should lessen some of the volume like what the other guys said. Congrats on the cross and now that you have both maltese and iron cross, which one puts more stress on the elbows? I'm assuming the cross since you never mentioned having this problem when you got the maltese. I've always thought maltese was harder on the elbows.

I don't quite have a maltese yet; I'm still at the point where I can pause briefly in the descent but can't hold for an appreciable length of time. Personally I find maltese work a bit harder on the elbows, but since I can't do an unassisted maltese yet, it's less of an issue. 

Since everyone's suggesting I lower the volume, I'm going to switch to full cross holds just once a week (still 2x4s), and do strap work on the other straight-arm day. 

Nice work Hari, I'm looking forward to the video.

Have you thought about following the template from Foundation One?  That would give you a nice plan to slowly increase your volume.  If you followed the lowest volume template the earliest you would perform the same volume as you're doing right now would be in 5 weeks.

CraigR said:

Nice work Hari, I'm looking forward to the video.

 

Have you thought about following the template from Foundation One?  That would give you a nice plan to slowly increase your volume.  If you followed the lowest volume template the earliest you would perform the same volume as you're doing right now would be in 5 weeks.

I considered the foundation templates, but Coach Sommer has stated that he believes steady-state cycles are more appropriate for intermediate strength training, so I figured that was a better way to go about training crosses. And honestly, even if I wanted to, I'm not sure I could follow the 10s mastery template in just 12 weeks. 

[Also, I've been doing 2x4s, which I think is more comparable to week 2 than week 5.]

Of course, sorry in my notes I don't distinguish between reps or secs for the templates. What I really meant was follow the 5x5 rep template but substitute secs instead of reps.

I think you are making the right call in going down to once a week. And for this element with steady state, until it stabilises.